


The Empty Room

by non_canonical



Series: The First Step [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Drugs, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-04
Updated: 2011-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-23 10:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/non_canonical/pseuds/non_canonical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been the biggest case of Sherlock's career.  Of course the crash was going to be spectacular.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Empty Room

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to: [mamishka](http://mamishka.livejournal.com) for providing endless support and read-throughs, as this idea went through its various incarnations; to [lbmisscharlie](http://lbmisscharlie.livejournal.com) for performing lightning-fast beta duties; and, last but not least, the chaps at [sherlockconcrit](http://sherlockconcrit.livejournal.com) for the wonderful feedback.

Panic jolts Sherlock awake. He's stayed too long; they're going to find him. He staggers to his feet, drunk with exhaustion, dizzy with adrenaline. He's swaying in the foetid below-decks of a Hong Kong junk. He's glaring at the toxic green walls of the room he's rented by the hour in the Reeperbahn. His brain is whirling, racing through the moves and counter-moves that are going to keep him one step ahead, keep him alive. He reaches for his bag (always within arm's reach) and stares at the empty bedroom floor in confusion. It takes him far too long to remember that it's over, that he's already won.

He'd like nothing more than to delete the last fourteen months.

He pulls his dressing gown around him and wanders into the sitting room. His fingertips clink along the test tubes, flasks, petri dishes – the contents long since discarded, all traces scoured away with heat and pressure. He wrenches the knife out of the mantelpiece, flicks through the letters (last year's correspondence) and tosses them to the floor. Everything has been painstakingly reconstructed (Mycroft's little homecoming present), and it's suffocatingly dull. He's a ghost, drifting through the relics of his past life.

Sherlock hurls himself onto the sofa. Sixty-one relentless weeks, the highest stakes he's ever played for: the crash was always going to be spectacular. He's been expecting it – looking forward, even, to the long-denied indulgence of it – but somehow it's all wrong. He's home again, but there's something missing.

Sherlock glares at his phone as though he can make it ring through sheer force of will. He needs a case. What's the point of Lestrade being a Chief Inspector now, if he can't bend the rules? He fails to see why being legally dead is a problem. (At least he's not _brain_ -dead like some of the idiots Lestrade is handing cases to.) And it's not going to be forever. While it might amuse Mycroft to watch him squirm, his brother knows the consequences of prolonging the situation.

He lifts the leather case down from its shelf and brushes his fingertips across the contents. He soothes the rosin down the dry hair of the bow, coaxes the violin back into tune. The first note vibrates through him, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Sheet music next to the stand; he takes the Bach from the top of the pile. He makes it through the _allemanda_ , but he's not in the mood (tedious mathematical progressions) and when he launches into the _corrente_ the strings begin to bite into his softened fingers. The bow slurs to a halt.

Bach hits the floor. Mozart follows: hardly a challenge. Schoenberg's atonal monstrosities are only entertaining when there's an audience to inflict them on. He pauses, the Mendelssohn trembling slightly in his hand. (John seated in his armchair, pen hovering over the crossword, head subtly nodding in time with the music.)

John, fists clenched, glaring at him across his living room (Sherlock's already been through the rest of his flat: separate bedrooms; the Browning gathering dust in the bottom of John's wardrobe; a housework rota stuck to the fridge door), shaking his head when Sherlock says, “It's really me.”

John laughing, exhilarated, following Sherlock just like the old days, with Lestrade calling after them, Moran hurling abuse as he's bundled into the back of a police car.

John, sitting across from him (Angelo's, the window table again), the adrenaline wearing off. John, uncertain how Sherlock is going to fit into the safe, orderly life he's made for himself.

Sherlock ruthlessly deletes that train of thought.

He studies himself in the bathroom mirror, tugs at his hair: dark again now the bleach has been cropped out, but still too short to curl. Everything's too round, too soft. He runs his fingers over his plump cheeks, feels the alien presence of the silicone beneath the skin.

It's a year ago, and he's standing in front of a different mirror, tearing away the bandages under the merciless fluorescent lights. Every morning, for weeks afterwards, he'd shaved a stranger's face, red blooming against his hospital pallor when his razor stuttered over the unfamiliar contours.

He tries to tell himself it doesn't matter, but he wants it back (his old face, his old life, the way it was before he submitted to the knife), and suddenly it's intolerable.

Sherlock blinks. The glass is fractured, the frame skewed, but somehow the mirror is still clinging to the wall. The knuckles of his right hand begin to throb, and the pain turns sharper when he pulls the shards from his skin.

When he's finished cleaning up the blood he takes out his phone. To his credit, Mycroft offers no comment, simply makes the necessary arrangements.

The surgeon's good – Mycroft's people are always good – and she wastes no time with useless questions. She talks him through the procedure, but he spares her only a fraction of his attention, because there, right there on the desk are his records, the photographs from _before_ , and no matter how hard he tries, he just can't take his eyes off them.

When he wakes, afterwards, the pain is worse than he remembers. It shouldn't come as a surprise. The last time, he'd had the work to distract him, an entire campaign to plan (had worked out how to deal with Moriarty's Chinese associate before he'd left the recovery room). This time he lies in the dark and thinks about John, pushing a plate of Angelo's spaghetti towards him, concerned in spite of his anger. Sherlock had predicted the anger, the hurt, the incomprehension, but there had been something else. Something in John's voice (soft and sharp, all at the same time), in the way his hand slid hesitantly across the table, close enough to Sherlock's that his skin prickled in anticipation, only to be snatched back. Sherlock's missed something, and he doesn't know what.

He's already dressed when the surgeon makes her rounds. He glares at the woman as best he can with his eyes nearly swollen shut, and leaves the information leaflet on the bedside cabinet when he discharges himself. He's been through this before, after all.

The taxi driver winces at the sight of Sherlock's face (swollen and angry where it's not concealed by dressings) and opens his mouth. Sherlock cuts him off – a string of unflinching observations about the man's family life and financial situation, rude enough to run the risk of getting him kicked out of the cab, but worth it just to shut the man up – because he absolutely will not be subjected to anybody's pity.

A small cardboard box is waiting for him on the mantelpiece, bearing the label of the hospital's dispensary. A gesture of trust on Mycroft's part, an acknowledgement that Sherlock has changed. Sherlock thinks he preferred it when his brother disapproved.

The pain slowly fades.

Texts from Mycroft; he ignores them.

Voicemails from Lestrade: jewellery theft in Hatton Garden; a missing toddler; something about an attempted bank robbery, and is he sure he doesn't want to take a look? He would, but he needs to rebuild his strength.

John doesn't call.

Mrs Hudson is in a flutter, waving a letter in his face – had to be signed for, must be important – but he glares at the return address (obscure government department) and throws it onto the table unopened. Two days later, curiosity wins out over suspicion, and he finds out that he's been officially raised from the dead. It ought to make him happier. He ought to get back to work.

One afternoon, he stumbles out of bed to the smell and sizzle of frying bacon, Mrs Hudson at the stove, wearing a ridiculous pink apron. He sneers behind her back and leaves the sandwich untouched on the table. When she's gone, he sits and reaches for the plate. He'd been in the habit of eating (hungry or not: couldn't afford to be ill), but it was a habit he's starting to unlearn. He manages a bite, two, then a third before his stomach rebels.

Sherlock stands in front of the shattered mirror, and a hundred tiny faces that aren't quite his stare back at him. Skin swollen, then purple, then yellow; livid incisions fading to shiny pink scars. It should be possible to chart the passing days from the rate of healing, but he seems to have misplaced the relevant data.

He gnaws at the sutures inside his cheeks, and feels nothing.

Sherlock wakes to a room golden with sunlight. He rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling – his eyes no longer pain him. A tentative tap on his bedroom door: Mrs Hudson, he can smell the tea she's brought him. He doesn't answer. She waits seven and a half minutes before shuffling away. He watches the rectangle of light crawl across the cracked plaster, the silence from the empty room upstairs buzzing in his head like static. The room is shading into sunset when he finally moves.

Sherlock digs his nails behind the glass, and prises loose the largest fragment of mirror. He places it on the coffee table next to the bag of white powder. He just wants to feel alive (to feel anything).

In the grey before dawn, he perches on the windowsill and watches the last revellers stagger and shout their way down Baker Street – London, the real world, passing him by. He picks up his phone (John's number on speed dial) but stops with his thumbs a hair's breadth from making the connection. It's late (or is it early?) and John keeps regular hours now. Paediatric A&E: a job that John cares about. Not the sort of job to fall asleep on.

His body is heavy and sluggish. Gravity sinks its hooks into him, pulling him down – into bed, onto the sofa, the floor – and he can no longer muster the energy to fight its pull. It gets harder to drag himself away from the soft embrace of his mattress.

No matter how much he sleeps, he's always tired.

The tang of lavender makes Sherlock's nostrils twitch. Mrs Hudson's been here, but he has no recollection of it. Nothing's been moved, nothing's been left, just that scent. (Half-deleted memories of a childhood summer in Provence.) He's sitting on the sofa and his face is wet, but he doesn't remember crying. His hand aches where it's clenched around something hard and metallic. His fingers creak open and the light glints on steel and mother-of-pearl: his father's straight razor, and he's not sure how it got there. He's not sure what he's planning to do with it. (Doesn't want to die, just sometimes wishes he'd never been born.)

Footsteps on the stairs – not Mrs Hudson again, someone else, someone with the echo of a limp, someone who hasn't climbed those stairs in a long time – and Sherlock's heart begins to beat a little faster.

John takes a step into the room, his mouth twisting into a nervous smile. “I was just passing.” He's still an awful liar. “Just wanted to make sure you haven't disappeared again.”

John fidgets, eyes drawn to Sherlock's face, and sherlock wonders what he's seeing there. John takes another step inside, and now his gaze is darting around the room. "My god, it's exactly the same."

Sherlock is studying John's face, so he knows the second he sees the coke, the empty packet of painkillers, the razor, sees it in the way his face pales for a moment before flushing with anger. And he tries to speak, to explain, that John's got it all wrong (not wrong, not exactly, but he hasn't done more than think about it), but John's fingers are digging into his biceps.

John's glaring at him, and he keeps saying, “Christ! For Christ's sake, Sherlock!” as if it were a question. Sherlock opens his mouth again, but all the words seem to have shrivelled up inside him, and he can only stare dumbly.

John heaves out a shaky sigh. The bruising pressure softens into something that's almost a caress. “Why didn't you text me?” John's blinking up at him with wide, liquid eyes. “I thought you'd get in touch.”

It's hard work fighting gravity, and Sherlock's head bows, dragged down by its own weight until his forehead comes to rest against John's. John's hand ghosts across his jaw, traces the sensitive hollows under his cheekbones. Sherlock flinches, but John just tightens his grip, and it _hurts_.

There's that look on John's face again, the one from the restaurant, the one that Sherlock couldn't quite decipher, only now he knows what it is – and oh, he always misses something. Sherlock isn't used to being the last person to know. Just this once, he doesn't mind.

“I must be crazy,” John chokes, with something between a laugh and a sob, and he pulls Sherlock down again.

Sherlock yields to the pressure of John's lips against his. The incisions in his mouth flare and sting, the imperfectly knitted flesh raw beneath John's tongue. Sherlock shivers at the thought of what John's doing to the Hippocratic Oath. Then he smiles into the pain (fresh, vivid, _real_ ), and lets it shock him awake.

For a moment it's too much, this sudden return to life. Sherlock's tired, and it isn't easy standing up all by himself. But John's arms tighten around him in a way that's nothing to do with the kiss, and everything to do with keeping him on his feet.

Sherlock leans into John's embrace, and trusts that John won't let him fall.


End file.
